An important shift has taken place in the Canadian labour movement. For the first time in history, a sitting president of the Canadian Labour Congress, which represents 3.3-million workers, has lost an election. Six weeks ago, it looked like the convention would be a coronation.

We republish here an article written by Eugene V. Debs in which he takes up the need for the US labor movement to form its own independent political party—a labor party. His perspectives for the formation of such a party—requiring the mobilization of the labor movement’s rank and file, the necessity for such a party to be based on labor, the need to avoid more “third party fiascoes,” and his clear differentiation between a reformist program and what he calls “the working class program for deliverance from industrial servitude”—were quite advanced in 1925 and are still highly relevant today.

Editorial forSocialist Appeal80 - Those who can see only the surface of society take this to mean that the working class either no longer exists, or is no longer a revolutionary force for change. The Marxists, however, view the world dialectically, look beneath the surface appearances, and understand that as long as capitalism and classes continue, so too does the class struggle.

The bourgeois press went into overdrive about organized labor’s “devastating defeat” in the South, after workers at a Chattanooga, TN Volkswagen plant voted 712 to 626 against unionizing. One could detect a triumphant tone in the coverage, as if to say, “What more evidence could you ask for? The unions’ days are finished!”